Did It Yet Again :Banghead:

[Dockhead]

How many times have you started a diesel engine with the sea cock off? Come on, 'fess up.

Once -- ok, anyone can do it. Twice -- mistakes were made. But three times? Four times????

I have only once in my life started a propulsion engine with the sea cocks closed. There was no damage (the seawater pump on my Yanmar is curiously robust).

God knows how many times I've done it with my genset . The problem is that -- first of all, I'm terribly absent minded, let's just get that on the table at the outset. And secondly, I have a rule of never leaving the boat overnight with the seacocks open. But then I have been living aboard since April and almost never spending a night off the boat, so the sea cocks didn't get closed much.

I just got back from a short business trip, drove down from Heathrow, arrived after midnight, dinghied out to my mooring, and oh joy -- home. The first thing I did was flip on the generator. And only when the awful squeal of the impeller exploding rang out, did I realize what an idiot I had been

And the 30 minute job of changing it naturally drags into an hour, an hour and a half . . . . Because you lose the woodruff key, or you can't find a tool, or you stupidly ingest seawater into your vacuum cleaner while sucking up the impeller debris, etc., etc., ad nauseum . . . .

Bleh!

I monitor what's going on with my genset with temperature senders at the thermostat and the seawater pump (the temp of the seawater pump being a good proxy for seawater flow). I have alarms set up, but somehow I did not hear them (maybe they're silent? ).

Now I think the only thing to do is hang some kind of sign on the genset start switch -- I can't keep going on like this.

*******

By the way, I tried the cable tie trick for putting a new impeller in -- it works extremely well. With a cable tie around it, the impeller goes straight in. Then you have to somehow wangle the cable tie back out again, but this is better than the alternative by a long shot. With the vanes retracted, you can with vastly more ease manipulate the impeller to line up with the woodruff key. Highly recommended.